​ACLU follows through on vow to appeal decision to dismiss NSA suit

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed an appeal against the US National Security Agency’s indiscriminate collection of telephone metadata after the group's suit seeking to halt the policy was dismissed last week.

The ACLU first filed suit against Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper in June 2013, just after the Edward
Snowden’s disclosure about the classified NSA program that
regularly compels phone companies to provide the government with
millions of phone records. The civil liberties advocacy group
argued that the program violated Americans’ First and Fourth
Amendment rights.

US District Judge William Pauley disagreed, dismissing the case
on December 27 and declaring that the NSA program is subject to
harsh oversight and is needed to effectively fight terrorism.

“There is no evidence that the government has used any of the
bulk telephony metadata it collected for any purpose other than
investigating and disrupting terrorist attacks,” he wrote.
“While there have been unintentional violation of guidelines,
those appear to stem from human error and the incredibly complex
computer programs that support this vital tool.”

The ACLU vowed immediately that is would press on and on Thursday
filed an appeal again challenging the collection program, which
does not monitor individual conversations but tracks numbers
dialed, as well as the time and duration of the calls. Jameel
Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said he expects the Second
Circuit Court of appeals to hear oral arguments on the case in
the springtime.

“The government has a legitimate interest in tracking the
associations of suspected terrorists, but tracking those
associations does not require the government to subject every
citizen to permanent surveillance,” Jaffer said in a press
release. “Further, as the President’s own review panel
recently observed, there’s no evidence that this dragnet program
was essential to preventing any terrorist attack. We
categorically reject the notion that the threat of terrorism
requires citizens of democratic countries to surrender the
freedoms that make democracies worth defending.”

Just how the appeals court will rule is impossible to predict.
Judges, as well as lawmakers, are split regarding the legality of
the NSA programs.

US District Judge Richard Leon ruled in December that the NSA’s
collection of phone metadata was likely unconstitutional, issuing
preliminary injunctions to stop the metadata collection.

“The question I will ultimately have to answer when I reach
the merits of this case someday is whether people have a
reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the
government, without any bias whatsoever to suspect them of
wrongdoing, collects and stores for five years their telephony
metadata for purposes of subjecting it to high-tech querying and
analysis without any case-by-case judicial approval,” Leon
wrote in what was an encouraging sign for privacy advocates.

Also in agreement was the panel appointed by US President Obama
to review the NSA’s surveillance policies. The review group
issued its recommendations early last month, advising Obama and
the NSA to discontinue the phone metadata collection. Among other
suggestions, the panel said it would ban such surveillance
tactics and delete the large cache of phone and internet data the
NSA currently has stored.